As spammers improve their software and methodologies, we improve our spam detector algorithms. There is also our favorite unsubscribe button, which tells the spammer that we are not interested in the current topic and he can focus his energy in a different subject.

The point is that in the digital age, it is still possible to remove the unwanted ads or at least reduce them to a manageable amount. But how about the real life ? How can we ask the banks to stop sending you credit card applications in the mail? How can we remove that giant LED billboard from our sight ?

As VR/AR is getting better and better, It's becoming more interesting for me to prototype a virtual reality app to detect and remove ads as you walk down the street.

At this moment that I'm writing this blog, GearVR is the only hardware that could help with this prototype. It has a camera that you can view in VR mode and enough power for a simple image detector CV app to detect and track an image in from the camera feed.

The most common response to people seeing this display is, What the heck is that? Well, back in our media lab, we’ve been experimenting with an R&D project involving Kinect technology and an interactive volumetric display. As visitors pass into the range of the Kinect, their image is translated and displayed in the LED cube. Here’s a visual explanation of how it all works:

And here are some technical notes on what’s happening behind-the-scenes…

The volumetric display is a combination of a 10x10x16 LED matrix and Microsoft Kinect technology. Here, we have focused on creating volumetric imagery by using the depth camera to visualize information as a 3-dimensional display. To communicate with the LED cube and send information over the network, we used Microsoft .Net Micro Framework.

Skeleton tracking is another technology that we took advantage of in this research. By using the newest Kinect for Windows SDK inside the Unity 3D environment we were able to create simple games for our LED cube. In one of the games, the player can control the size of particles inside the cube by using their hands and in another game, they can interact with a bouncing ball.

As for the hardware, our friends at Juliet Zulu provided and built the physical display, which includes the frame, the LEDs, and the LED drivers.